I am at my wits end with this one. My captures consistently drop 9 frames right in a row about every 25-35 minutes. I have tried different capture programs, different codecs, different capture cards, different sources, hell, even different cables and I cannot seem to figure it out.

Anyone have an idea? This problem is driving me crazy!

My current setup: Intel Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 500GB SATA drives (I'm not capturing to my OS drive), Hauppage HVR-1800 (purchased in hopes of solving the issue, I was using a WinFast TV2000 XP Expert), Windows XP Pro. I mainly use VirtualVCR to capture, but I've used various other progams as well.

@Revgen
Thanks for the reply. I've considered this, and I've tried different HDDs to solve this issue. The the only common element is they were all SATA. The ones I'm currently using are Seagate Baracuda 7200.10 3.0GB/s drives, so I'm sure speed isn't the issue. My RAM is 4GB matched pair OCZ DDR2 800 (PC26400), so I doubt its too slow as well.

So, does anyone capture to a SATA HDD? I'd be shocked if that was the issue, but at this point I can't rule anything out.

@MaggIvy
Yeah, that is what I am currently doing, and is what I'm trying to avoid. And I agree it sounds like a heat issue for you.

What background or scheduled tasks you've running - antiviruses, defragmenters, some updaters or similar? Does some piece of your hardware (eg other HDD) go sleep after 30min of inactivity? Have you any records in eventlogs, corresponding to frames dropping time?

@Revgen
Thanks for the reply. I've considered this, and I've tried different HDDs to solve this issue. The the only common element is they were all SATA. The ones I'm currently using are Seagate Baracuda 7200.10 3.0GB/s drives, so I'm sure speed isn't the issue. My RAM is 4GB matched pair OCZ DDR2 800 (PC26400), so I doubt its too slow as well.

So, does anyone capture to a SATA HDD? I'd be shocked if that was the issue, but at this point I can't rule anything out.

This might sound odd to you, but certain HDD's can have incompatabilities with certain motherboards.